Doctors, Fake & Otherwise
by Regency
Summary: AU. It's been three years since the disastrous mission that killed the rest of SG-1 and Sam isn't coping well. PTSD has landed her in Mayfield, where she hopes she can get the help she needs and be close to Cassie while she attends med school. She isn't looking to make allies, but that's exactly what she finds in the genius misanthrope also known as Gregory House. In Progress.
1. Chapter 1

Author: Regency

Title: Doctors, Fake and Otherwise

Crossover: _House, M.D._ & _Stargate SG-1_

Rating: PG for non-graphic violence

Spoilers: AU from the end of season seven of _SG-1_ and the beginning of season six for _House, M.D._

Warnings/Categories: AU, implied character death, angst, friendship, UST, drama, non-graphic violence, mentions of suicidal ideations, deals vaguely with mental disorders

Pairings: implied Sam/Jack UST, Sam/House UST, implied House/Cuddy UST

Word count:

Summary: It's been three years since the disastrous mission that killed the rest of SG-1 and Sam isn't coping well. PTSD has landed her in Mayfield, where she hopes she can get the help she needs and be close to Cassie while she attends med school. She isn't looking to make allies, but that's exactly what she finds in the genius misanthrope also known as Gregory House. What he sees in her, she'll never know, because he'll never tell her. What she sees in him is maybe a second chance.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from _Stargate SG-1 & House, M._D. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

"Your file says you're a doctor."

Sam looked up from the _Science_ Journal on her lap to the shadowy figure lurking overhead.

"Does it?" She'd have been more surprised about him knowing that if she hadn't had the pleasure of watching him run roughshod over the staff around here for the last three weeks.

"What's your specialty," he continued without preamble. Sam shrugged and went back to reading in what little light managed to spill around him.

"I'm probably not the kind of doctor you're thinking of." She noticed the way he swayed from his silhouette. _Favors the right leg. Wonder what the story is there._ She turned the page.

"So, you're a fake doctor, then. Brilliant," he quipped with more than a hint of venom. "Just when I thought there was at least one non-idiot around here to save me from the monotony."

"Read a book," she advised and turned the page again. She'd already read this issue twice and gone over it with her nice red pen—she wasn't allowed sharpies, damn it—but it was the only one she had, so once more with contrivance went she.

"All the books here suck. I've already finished the ones I brought with me." Sam raised an eyebrow and resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. For a second there, just for a second, he reminded her so much of Colonel O'Neill that she had to resist to urge to reach for her emergency yoyo. If there was one thing she'd learned in ten years under the colonel's command, it was that he couldn't be trusted to stay out of trouble if he was bored. He needed entertainment and he needed it ASAP.

"You could try asking some of the other patients if they have some books you could borrow." There was a moment of silence so acute that, were it not for the shade he still cast over her, she might have thought he'd wandered away.

"How about you? What kind of books you got?" Sam finally shut the journal and sat back to look at the man so boldly intruding upon her silence.

"None you'd be interested in." Still wavering just so on his feet, he rolled a pair of clear blue eyes towards the heavens.

"Why, thank you, Dr. Feelgood."

Sam loosed an amused smirk. "I told you, I'm not that kind of doctor." Her guest shrugged, eyes flickering toward the floor and taking on an air of uncertainty.

"You read science journals—or _a_ science journal, to be more precise. You've gotta be doing something interesting when you're not playing psych patient."

Sam crossed her arms. She knew it sent all the wrong messages, but she couldn't force herself to care. This wasn't about impressing him, it was about holding herself in tight to keep from bursting apart at the seams. She'd been waiting for the feeling to return for hours, but it'd been gone for days.

"Classified," she grunted through clenched teeth. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to think about it.

She could not smell ozone in the air.

She could _not _smell ozone in the air.

She couldn't feel superheated steel against her skin.

That was not the impression of Daniel's sidearm burning into her side for all time.

Teal'c was not trying to carry what remained of the colonel toward the gate.

There was no gate.

There was no planet.

That was then, before.

_This is now._

_They're dead._

_ I'm alive._

…even if she didn't _feel_ alive.

Sam merely pulled her arms around herself tighter and tighter until the only thing she could feel was her fists against her ribs. _They feel sort of like Daniel's_. She held onto that sense memory as tight as she could. Three years later, she was still expecting him to walk back through the door. _Daniel never dies; he doesn't know how._

He was impervious. They all were—until they weren't.

Now, Sam was all that remained of the once great SG-1. There wasn't a day that went by when she didn't wish she wasn't. That way she wouldn't have to wonder why.

"Hey," said her hovering visitor with a lithe-fingered hand dangling in the air above her shoulder. "You all right? Don't think you can go nuts just because you're in a nuthouse. I need company and you're it, so, snap out of it."

Any other time and place, Sam would have seriously considered decking this guy, but she was grateful enough for his pulling her out of her flashback that she was going to let the opportunity pass her by, just this once. If he touched her any time soon, though, all bets were off.

"What exactly would it take to entertain you," she asked first. "Who are you, anyway? You've seen my file, but I haven't seen yours. That doesn't exactly seem fair." He smirked at her. She considered smacking him in the face. _The last few years have done a number on my social skills._

"Life isn't fair."

Sam rolled her own clear blue eyes this time.

"And you're a pain in the ass. Thank you, Captain Obvious."

He smirked a little and looked highly amused.

"Nice attitude."

Sam raised an eyebrow, Teal'c-style. "Likewise. Think it's contagious."

"Sorry, have to say mine's nurture, not nature. I'd say hereditary, because my dad had it, but since he wasn't really my dad, he was just an asshole. Therefore, I think it's safe to say I got it from the mailman." Sam blinked and leaned back just slightly. _This is a job for MacKenzie if I ever saw one. Okay, maybe not. I wouldn't subject my worst enemy to him._

"You may be the craziest lucid person in the room." At that, the man seemed to preen. _Well, as much as a man who could probably give a damn what others think can preen._

"What can I say? I've been an overachiever all my life." _The line between genius and insanity has been breached. Welcome to Crazytown._

"That's something I know a little about."

"Do tell," he prompted with a curious gleam in his eyes. She shifted uncomfortably in her highly uncomfortable chair.

"Not really in the mood. Besides, I doubt it would interest you."

"And, somehow, I doubt that." He moved his hands as though he was looking for something to lean on, but it wasn't there. He finally settled for his pockets instead. _If he was the colonel, he'd be bouncing on the balls of his feet right about now._ But she didn't want to think about the colonel, he was a trigger, too. Maybe worse than all the rest.

"Then, I admit it'll bore me, then."

"You're the entertainment, you don't get a vote." She thought he looked far too pleased with himself at that. She uncrossed her arms and let them sit on the armrests on either side of her. She wasn't defensive and defending; she was simply watching. She'd learned a thing or two about being the subject of observation over the years.

"Nice to know how you really feel about me."

"Meet me in the janitor's closet after lights out and I'll really show you," he zinged with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows. If Sam thought he was actually serious, she might have been worried. Instead, she chose to be highly amused, as though he was Daniel, wasted, and making an idiot of himself.

"Thanks for the offer, but I have a dinner date with my 9mm around the same time. Maybe next lifetime?" After Daniel had told her about the state the colonel had been in when they met, it was years before Sam felt comfortable joking about suicide. Now that they were both gone, she'd lost any motivation to be tactful. _Guess that's contagious, too._

"A woman with a gun? Getting hotter all the time." Sam had officially run out of facial expressions to answer his inanity. _The colonel would definitely be impressed._

"A woman with a gun, a hunting knife, and level four hand-to-hand combat training? Yeah, I can see how that might get you all fired up." Tall, scruffy, and lame gave her an almost painfully thorough onceover. Every person she'd known who could look through her and at her that way had died years ago. She hadn't expected to ever feel that again—just like she hadn't expected how much she'd miss it.

"Am I imagining you, because it's like you stepped right out my fantasies fully-formed." Sam stifled both of her kneejerk reactions. One was to cry, the other was to smack him in his obviously ailing leg. She settled for allowing their banter to remain a battle of wit and not of brawn. _Teal'c would say that it is dishonorable to strike a physically disabled opponent,_ and she'd always trusted his judgment on those sorts of things.

"Your fantasy world is a scary place."

"Apparently Intake agrees, because they sent me straight up this creek without either paddle or cane to guide me." Sam settled in, because she was actually starting to enjoy him.

"Did they take your meds, too, because that seems like it might have been a premature decision."

He paused, stared balefully at her, and loosed a startling bark of laughter. "Oh, this is the part where I'm supposed to laugh. Sorry, not used to such sophisticated humor."

"I buy that."

"Touché."

"Indeed," she parroted the late and lamented, Teal'c.

"And you say I'm weird," he muttered before turning around and lurching away.

Sam stared after him for a long, confused minute before shaking her head and turning her attention back to her journal. Well, she would have turned her attention back to it, if she could have found it. Apparently, it had walked away during her little tête-à-tête with the limping interloper. She had a feeling she knew where it had gotten to and that she'd be seeing it—and him—again eventually.

For want of anything else to do, Sam stood up and went in search of a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. She hadn't designed anything new in months; now, there were figures and shapes whirling in back of her mind. Maybe it was sudden inspiration, or maybe it was just about time.


	2. Chapter 2

"So, you're a fake."

Sam looked up suddenly to the figure lurking in the open doorway beside her. It was the janitor's closet and Sam just happened to be…er, lurking on by. _I should have expected to see him up this time of night. _

"…Uh. What?" Not her at her most eloquent, but that was about what he should have expected from a patient in a psychiatric institution. Even if she wasn't being medicated—currently.

"What is your _fake_ area of expertise?"

The former Air Force Lt. Colonel stood up straight and looked her interrogator in the eye—as much as she could in the nearly pitch black hallway.

"My very valid specialty is in the field of Theoretical Astrophysics."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said 'valid.' No, I meant 'existent.' Is that even an actual academic field or are you in here because you're a pathological liar?"

Sam inhaled deeply and held it. She decided to humor the cuckoo in the closet. "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." He tipped his head and looked at her askance. "That's why I'm here."

"What happened?"

She decided to give him the clean, unclassified version. "Military training exercise went FUBAR. I lived, my team died. I've been reliving it ever since."

He didn't appear to have anything to say in response.

"Satisfied?"

"Not really. Mostly curious to find out what you're lying about now, because you're definitely still lying."

Sam clasped her hands behind her back, falling instinctively to parade rest. "What gives you that idea?"

"Your eyes dilate in that millisecond between stating a fact and regurgitating a well-practiced fabrication." How he could tell in this dearth of light, Sam didn't know. His wrists twitched and she wondered if he'd be tapping a cane or a crutch right about now. "Turns out you're way more interesting than you seem."

Sam tipped her head to match his posture. "I wish I could say the same about you."

"I would give that a 'Touché,' but why waste a good comeback? I don't have to be interesting, I have charm."

Sam pursed her lips and blinked. "There's nothing I can say to that that won't be construed as offensive."

He narrowed his eyes at her, daring her to say any of what danced on the tip of her tongue. "Do your worst."

"I'll pass." She took a step back to demonstrate.

"Wimp." He staggered out of the gaping janitor's closet until she could see him leaning against the wall in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and loose fitting sleep pants.

"Bully." She could lean against a wall just as well, and banter, too.

"Glorified lab tech." That earned him a glare from her. _Nobody calls me a lab tech._

"Witch doctor." She'd taken a turn at hacking the hospital's patient records herself and found that her newest companion was the slightly eccentric and more than slightly ingenious Doctor Gregory House. Sam wasn't exactly looking to make friends, but it would be nice to talk to someone who understood, well, being the smartest person in the room without trying. It had been years since she'd had that. Daniel and Rodney McKay had been the last people she'd been able to share that with. _Nowadays, I try to share as little with McKay as possible._

"Hey, now, I'm no hypnotherapist. I practice gen-u-wine medicine, real scientific-like and everything," he bantered, a mocking hick accent abounding.

Sam fought the flicker of a smile at her mouth. She really shouldn't encourage him. "Some people would consider your work in diagnostic medicine supernatural."

Now, he seemed intrigued. "Looks like I'm not the only one who's been doing some snooping."

"Never claimed I was above breaking the law to satisfy my own curiosity."

The light from an exit sign made his eyes dance wickedly. "Should I propose now or should I wait until after we have sex?"

"You're assuming there'll be sex. That's highly unlikely."

"You wound me."

"And that's just with words. Imagine what I could do to you with my gun."

"You keep trying to threaten me as if you think that's a turn-off for me. You don't get that I like you because you're interesting, not because you're non-threatening. I _like_ the threatening part," he emphasized with a leer. "And as long as you don't bore me, I'll be right where you don't want me." It was a challenge if Sam had ever heard one, and by God she'd heard a few.

Sam separated herself from the wall and crossed the empty corridor to stand in House's space. Between his knees, she braced herself on the wall behind him, effectively trapping him with more than words. "What if I decide that I do want you…around? Will you get bored, then, and leave?"

He paused a moment, seeming to reason it out in his head. "Probably, but we'll have a hell of a time before I go."

Sam smirked. "Commitment issues are so yesterday. Don't you have any interesting neuroses to share?"

He leaned down till she was faced with the first pair of unique blue eyes she'd seen in years. Nothing like her own, nothing like Daniel's had been. They were aesthetically pleasing, open—far more than he'd probably like, and vulnerable. _This commences the first meeting of the Walking Wounded. First order of business?_

He continued to look into her and Sam was starting to think that the good doctor wasn't just screwing with her. She was starting to think that he just might have been trying to form a connection. _There have to be easier ways to go about this._ Still, she didn't look away. It was least she could do for the first doctor in years to see her as a person and not a lost cause. So, she held his gaze and let him see more than he probably wanted to himself.

"I hallucinate," he confessed after an age, averting his eyes instead of keeping touch with hers. "I pretend I know what's real by responding only intermittently to anyone or anything. Most people just think it's me being _me_, but it's a coping mechanism. I figure if I keep it up, I'll eventually design a full-proof plan for getting through the day."

Sam had to fight the compulsion to rest her forehead against his. There wasn't much of a height difference and it would have been easy. He could have used someone to hold him up just then and she could have used him. But she didn't. She brushed the tips of her fingers against the plastic fastener of his ID bracelet and felt him tense at the touch. He was a taut tripwire, ready to snap and retreat, even if he couldn't get far on his own two feet.

_The colonel used to be this vulnerable. _She didn't like thinking on the fact that even in her head he was never Jack, that she never allowed him to be. _I wish I could have helped him, then._

"I spend my life reliving the past," she responded, finally. "Every other five minutes of my life, I'm back there again. It's a normal day, a normal exercise, the terrain is clear. I'm taking measurements at flank while my CO is covering our six with my other two teammates at point opposing flank, respectively. The colonel, my commanding officer, makes a bad joke. I laugh and there's eye rolling all around. He pretends he doesn't know why."

She didn't know why she was telling this story again, had no idea why she thought he might care, but she needed him to get her. She needed someone to understand that her loss had been real, in the hopes that maybe someone else would remember that these men had existed. It was the only way she could be sure they had.

"His instincts don't even twig when something changes and they've always been good, saved our lives more times…" She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "One minute, nothing has ever been more normal, or perfect, the next minute, we've got fire from the tree line and Daniel's taken a hit to the leg. T—Murray lays down cover fire and I start to all but carry Daniel back to the…rendezvous point. The colonel helps Murray cover us. Just as we're almost safe, a couple of combatants make it past them. Daniel takes out his sidearm even as he's staggering on an almost-useless leg. Colonel takes a hit, a bad one, and Murray throws him over his shoulder. Daniel goes down and takes me down with him. His gun's superheated, burns right through my t-shirt, where it landed. Still have the scar. Just as we hit our extraction point, Murray takes a hit to the back of the neck. Fatal—eventually."

Sam closed her eyes and saw that moment of calm acceptance in Teal'c face as he stumbled under the weight of the colonel's body and sudden paralysis. He wasn't going to live any more than Daniel on the ground beside her, any more than the colonel who'd stopped fighting moments before. He'd known that, then.

In that second, Sam had realized that she was about to be the one left behind.

"Every dream I have is about them. My best friends, my teammates, my family. I see them when they're not there, hear them when they can't speak. I still call their numbers, thinking they'll answer." She sighed, ignoring the phantom echo of the colonel whistling _The Simpsons'_ theme song. She missed the sounds of his distraction: his yoyo spinning as it walked the dog, his fingers and pen tapping on the briefing room table. That and Daniel muttering to himself, coupled with Teal'c's contemplative silence had been the soundtrack to her life for a decade. She wondered if she'd ever be able to accept not hearing it again. She'd still been mourning her father when she'd turned around and lost them.

"So," he began once she thought the silence might crush them, "life sucks, then?"

She cracked a smile in spite of seeing the stillness of their chests tattooed behind her eye lids, maybe for all time. "Yeahsureyabetcha."


	3. Chapter 3

By time either of them brought it up again, she was used to him appearing out of nowhere to talk to her.

"That didn't sound like any training exercise I've ever heard of," he murmured with more than his usual amount of discretion. That gave Sam pause, because House didn't do considerate. It was neither in his social repertoire nor in his nature. _Learned behavior. So he is a genius after all._

She was sort of regretting having told him that much now. None of it was incriminating, but he was exactly the kind of curious civilian they'd tried to avoid arousing. "We specialized in non-standard training operations."

"According to Google, you specialized in Deep Space Radar Telemetry." He stopped walking and she did, too, so attuned was she suddenly to everything about him.

"You've never heard of multitasking?" She might have been out of a job and out of the loop, but she was still loyal. Her best friends hadn't died for her so that she could expose the work they'd given so much to safeguard. She was also pretty certain he hadn't gotten his information from Google. _I really need to do a deeper background check on this guy._ It wouldn't do for him to be getting so close if he had NID ties.

"Of course, I have, but I've also heard of cover stories." He tilted his head toward the ceiling and looked down at her. "You forget you're talking to a military brat here. Rent-a-dad was USMC. I've heard some of the best bullshit the US Armed Forces has to offer and that, my oh so bodacious lab tech, is a shitty cover story."

Sam rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. She didn't disagree. SGC personnel kept a running tally of how often civilians call them on the government's poor attempt at a coverup. Daniel and the colonel used to make a game out of composing even more preposterous, and yet far more convincing, stories to tell the surrounding population. They'd never used any of them—orders and all that—but it had remained one of SG-1's many private jokes.

"Well, shitty or not, it's the only story I've got." She couldn't lie to him, because she just didn't have the energy, and she couldn't tell him the truth lest she risk time in the federal pen. Sam was sick and tired of being backed into corners.

"Okay," he ceded and just stood there. Sam waited for him to leave as he tended to do when he didn't like an answer she gave. He didn't leave.

"Just okay?"

"Yeah," he shrugged. "I know military types and military protocol. If you didn't give it up on my first attempt, it's a pretty good guess that you won't. So, rather than screw up what's sure to be a rousing stroll in the prison yard, I'll let it go."

"That's astonishingly logical, especially for you."

"Aw shucks, ma. Told ya I was all growed up." He put on a facsimile of a dim-witted grin and planted his fists on his hips in a mockery of country kid pride that managed to trip into adorable on its way out of irony.

"You are _not_ a normal person," she told him and turned back toward the doors that led to the gated enclosure outside. There wasn't much to do aside from basketball and hop-scotch, but it was the only way to get any sun here, thus Sam had never turned down a chance to go. She hadn't considered that he wouldn't want to lose another chance to go with her.

"Never said I was normal, just charming," he quipped as he limped after her.

"Uh huh." She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was starting to agree with him. _He's funny, engaging, and he doesn't push when I want him to stop. He's even kind of easy on the eyes._ She guessed he was all right. "So, do you want to talk or have you already lost interest in our stimulating intellectual conversations?"

"Not a chance, lab tech." He folded his hands behind him and managed to look appropriately deferent. Sam wasn't buying it. In her brief experience with the man, she'd learned hard and fast that he didn't do deferent. He did, however, do insulting and with impressive regularity at that.

Sam stepped out into the daylight ahead of him and paused to soak in the first ultraviolet rays of her day. This was just what she needed to recharge her emotional batteries before she headed back into therapy. Between grappling with survivor's guilt and her unresolved feelings for the late colonel, Sam had spent the better part of the last several weeks wanting to cease to exist. Her existence had been wrapped up in SG-1 and her work for so many years that it didn't seem right that one should exist when the others didn't. It didn't seem to make sense that she'd be the one to survive out of all of her men, out of Janet, out of her father, and General Hammond. She was just one soul, but she was alive and she was alone.

These days, Cassie was all she had and while she was grateful for the young woman's continued presence in her life, she needed more. Her work wasn't enough now that it wasn't a matter of world security.

Pretty much as soon as she'd been diagnosed, she'd been pulled from the mission roster, not that she'd expected any different. She was a danger to any personnel who went with her into the field. She could freeze up at any moment, blackout, flashback and do god only knew what in her out of touch state. It was better this way, but she still hated the drudgery that had become her life. She'd come to Mayfield in the hopes of getting past what had happened to her team. So far, all she'd done was pick up a similarly blue-eyed savant as her partner in crime.

"If you thought any louder, you'd get noise complaints. You're giving me a headache," said genius groused. They were trying to move out of the way of the shuffling throng of patients, but it was slower going than either would have liked.

"One of us has to do the thinking and, since you refuse, I suppose it has to be me." She poked because it was fun, and it kept his mind from wandering down darker paths. He always turned inward then and, in spite of all she'd seen, she couldn't follow him there.

"In other words?" His ire engaged, he was oblivious to the way she altered her gait to keep his pace. Exactly what she'd wanted. One of her first tasks as his, seemingly only, friend had been to reassure him that she didn't think less of him because of his leg. Although she never had, he was a hard man to convince.

"In other words, shut up and deal." She shook her head disbelievingly as it became immediately clear that he was not offended but impressed.

Those eyes shimmered in repressed glee. "Sure you're not a _real_ doctor? You've got the bedside manner for it."

"There's a joke about pots and kettles here, but it's a cliché and I was taught never to abide by those." Today was a good day, she could think about the colonel today.

"You're in a mental hospital, talking to a mental patient. You should probably start lowering your standards."

"You're just saying that because as they stand you don't have a chance with me."

"That, too."

She wasn't sure she believed him, but Sam shrugged anyway. "At least you're honest."

"Only when it suits me."

Continuing her routine of giving her eyes the workout of a decade, she rolled them up to stare at the clouds. "Yeah, I couldn't possibly have figured that out on my own." As he loved to say, _Everybody lies._

"You _are_ blonde," he snapped with a hint of derision that Sam was certain had nothing to do with her. It offended all the same.

"If I kick you in the leg, you'll cry; therefore, for you sake, I'm going to pretend that you had a blackout and weren't in control of your tongue just now." They both knew which leg she meant, and though she wasn't sure what exactly was wrong with it, she knew it hurt. _For a given value of 'faintly throbbing agony.' _ And hitting it? Would absolutely hurt. She wasn't that cruel on a good day.

He narrowed his pale blue gaze at her and she wondered if she was going to have to prove her willingness to drop him on the ground. She didn't particularly want to beat up on the only friend she'd made here, but she wasn't above it as a matter of principle. No friendship between them could last if he insisted on thinking her little more than a manifestation of his not-so-secret favorite kink.

"I wouldn't cry," he said, back to grousing with no sign of the intensity he'd shown moments before. "There might be screaming and writhing in agony, but there'd be no crying."

"I'll make sure to remember that when I'm wiping away your tears later on."

"Still with the jokes," he complained, though he didn't sound even slightly affronted.

"You know I love to laugh," Sam answered dryly. She laughed at her memories and she smiled at her comrade in imprisonment, but she didn't giggle with any regularity anymore. Truthfully, she wasn't sure she'd done all that much of that before joining SG-1 anyway. _Maybe I'm reverting to who I was before them and it'll take some getting used to._ If that was true, Sam wasn't sure she liked the woman she used to be, or ever wanted to be her again.

"Jokes make the world go 'round," he declared, triteness carving the pain lines on his face into grooves. He wasn't a fan of platitudes; he thought they were an agitator to suffering, not a relief.

"Bad ones make it go backwards." She knew something about physics and time and how much of it she'd always seemed to have when it was the four of them and an embarrassment of cheesy humor that wouldn't end, and that they never would have wanted to lose. But they had.

Staggering forward at her side, he muttered, "If only."

Bumping his shoulder gently in commiseration he couldn't possibly understand, she murmured, "Yeah," and walked a little slower.


	4. Chapter 4

The next time she saw House, he was staring at a wall and she was seriously weighing the pros and cons of kicking the hell out of one. She was used to the lingering anger now, but sometimes it was so strong it scared her.

Today, she wanted to scream, to rail. She wanted to sweep the board games off the table and throw a chair through a glass door. She wanted something to hit and someone to hurt, because that would mean she wasn't the only one bleeding regardless of whether anyone could see.

Her psychiatrist was a quack, a board-certified con artist, and she wanted him exposed for the charlatan he was. He was wrong and wrong about her and it might cost her what little peace of mind she still had.

She was positively murderous when she stalked into the day room where the inmates, as both she and House referred to their fellow patients, milled about between appointments and daily meals. Luckily for all concerned, no one collided with Sam on her warpath. There was only one person she wanted to see and all others would be met with harsh rebuke.

He was the first place she looked and he never turned around. The uninspired sea foam green wall rose only so far above their heads and only so far in front of his face, yet he didn't turn away. He seemed to have found his latest fixation. She wished him luck, she really did, but right now she needed him.

_He can make this make sense. He can show them that I didn't—I couldn't have…_ She didn't even know what all he had in his arsenal of intellectual weaponry but she needed every single bullet. Most of all, she just needed someone that would believe her.

Dropping on her knees at the arm of his chair, she did something she'd made a vow not to do.

She touched him.

Shaking fingers grasped the loose sleeve of his shirt and she lightly brushed the outside of his wrist. He didn't look at her, but he didn't pull away either. She hoped they were beyond that sort of reticence.

The knit fabric wrinkled in her hand and his pill blue eyes blinked under her scrutiny. She didn't know how to talk to him today, she didn't remember how it felt to have all the answers now. _Please listen to me anyway._

"You're a good doctor, right?" It was a question worthy of someone dumber than her, or so he would have thought. She didn't care, couldn't care, and hoped he'd put that particular care aside.

His focus flickered to her momentarily, interest piqued and pride aroused. "So, I've been told."

Without regard for space or mores, she wrapped her fingers wrapped around his wrist. "Great, I need you."

Seemingly pulled between warring impulses to escape and to crowd her, he jibed, "Knew it was only a matter of time," and pretended she wouldn't notice the difference. She did. Didn't care so much about that either.

"Shut up. Fix this." _Fix me_, she thought but didn't say. "Find out what's wrong with me. Find out what happened to me. Please."

Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter didn't beg. In all the years she'd spent facing down false gods on dozens, maybe hundreds, of worlds, she hadn't begged. She'd been tortured, enslaved, traded and sold. Once or twice, she'd even died, and never once had she begged, not for her life.

It wasn't just her life in jeopardy today, it was more. What remained of her sanity, what still allowed her the odd night of dreamless sleep, it could be gone if she didn't learn the truth. Because what that so called doctor had suggested in their session not half an hour ago was far from it. She was praying that it was far from it, but this just wasn't her area of expertise. _Something I'm not good at, guess that was inevitable._

"Okay," he grunted, yanking himself firmly out of her grasp and leaning as far away at the narrow chair allowed. Though not much, it told her all she needed to know about the relationship between Greg House and personal space; like lovers. "What the hell was that about?"

Sam knew she was breathing too fast, knew hyperventilation was on the horizon if she didn't control herself. She tried and then she tried to speak. The moment was a failure of familiar proportions. She dropped onto her haunches, rested her forehead down against the armrest, and cried instead. It went unsaid that this was something she didn't do. Like giggling and gunfights, she'd simply stopped after that day on P5X-873. Because nothing else could hurt as badly as that, not General Hammond's death and not the trivial injuries she'd suffered since then;, she'd simply given up on tears. She supposed this meant they hadn't given up on her.

"Cut it out, that's no way for a lab tech to behave."

"Not a lab tech," she retorted automatically, eyes still downcast.

"That's what all the duplicitous lab mice say. Why should I believe you?" He was prodding her smarting ego and it was working. What he could do for her smarting heart was something totally different. She wasn't in the mood to think about it.

"My quack of a psychiatrist just accused me of letting my team die. Said that I feel survivor's guilt because I didn't fire more than couple of shots during the firefight." She didn't have to look up at him to see the curious twitch of his eyebrows or the contemplative tilt of his head. She didn't have to look at him at all these days.

She looked anyway. He was staring through her again and she was too miserable to defend. She didn't even cross her arms to ward off his irrepressible leer. It was almost as if he could cure it—this problem, this allegation, this bane—by rendering it transparent at a glance. In truth, she only wished it was that easy. The last three years had proved that learning to live with the past was harder than surviving it in the first place.

"I did not let them die. I would _never_ have stood idly by while my team was slaughtered. That is _not_ what happened."

"Then what did happen?"

That was the big mystery of the death of SG-1 and, despite being the only person alive who could conceivably know, Sam had no idea. So, she gave an uneasy shrug. "I don't know. I've told you the story as I remember it and that's what I know."

House clicked his tongue skeptically. "You told me a story in which you initially had a part, yes."

The memories of that day had begun to sharpen their fangs anew. Sam could feel them writhing up her back, ready to leap forward and latch on without mercy or warning. Goose bumps rising on her skin, she inwardly shuddered. _Holy Hannah, I can't even escape the Goa'uld in my head._ She pretended not to feel it. "Meaning?"

"Meaning, at a certain point, you resigned from the role of active participant and became an observer." He had stopped contorting himself, stopped leaning away. "What changed?"

She gulped. "I don't understand. I told you what happened."

"You gave me an account of events as you saw them." He shifted in the chair; she couldn't tell if he was trying to move closer or further out of reach. "You and Soldier A hit the ground. You never say what you did after that." She ignored the fact that he'd never gotten the names right. Not his life, not his priority.

"It wasn't relevant." Not to mention the fact that she drew an absolute blank with regard to her own actions at this point. All she remembered was the searing heat of Daniel's gun and, then, nothing. No pain, no feeling, just a numb distance.

For a brief second, Sam read disbelief on his face before he blinked it away. He wore stoicism as well as her former commander ever had. He didn't buy her story and she might have been terrified most by the fact that she shouldn't have either.

"So, you just laid there?"

"Of course not!" she protested. She never would have just stayed down if she could have gotten back up. Forced back to that horrible day, she vaguely recalled the SGC medics remarking in amazement that she'd escaped with so little injury. She'd been too heavily sedated to comment at the time and had had no reason to think on it since. They had died, she'd been mostly unharmed; in their world, that was hardly uncommon luck for a team.

"Then, what did you do _instead_ of just lying there?"

Sam glared up at him and came to the abrupt conclusion that eyes the color of the Caribbean Ocean could be cruel and pitying all at once. He had no stomach for sympathy but excelled at pity, its spiteful brother. He paid her no mind and stamped his good leg in frustration. The motion jarred his whole body, bad leg included, and she grimaced when he grimaced.

He took to rubbing his right thigh viciously as though he could assault it into submission. She rubbed her fingers across the ugly scar on her side instinctively. That numbness was familiar to her. She wished she could share that with him.


End file.
